According to Cmelik, et. al, the older SPEC benchmarks (what was available
when the study was done) issue 5% of their instructions in libraries on a
MIPS platform and 9% on a SPARC platform. Most of the discrepancy can be
attributed to MIPS-platform `malloc' and `free' routines that optimize for
speed and SPARC-platform routines that optimize for space, to block memory
operations (memset, mcopy, memcopy, bzero, bcopy) that have more efficient
implementations on the MIPS, and to the need for (existing) SPARCs to call
library routines to perform multiplies. The first two are essentially
system and not CPU issues.